Zombie movies are very popular in the culture today, but what exactly is a Zombie and where does this idea come from?

The following is from Gotquestions.org:

A zombie is a modern-day, fictionalized plot device used in various books, films, and television shows. Zombies are imagined creatures that can be described as fully dead corpses which have been "reanimated"; that is, they act as though they are alive while continuing the natural process of decay. George A. Romero's seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead uses zombies to frame a satirical picture of American society, culture, and politics. Romero's zombies are mindless, flesh-eating monsters that stumble about, intent on fulfilling a craving for human brains. Zombies have been a staple of the horror genre since 1968, and a zombie craze is prevalent in American culture today.

However, the walking dead is not merely a 20th-century idea. Practitioners of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa have long believed that sorcerers are responsible for reanimating and controlling corpses. Additionally, mythologies and legends abound with references to the deceased returning to “life” while still dead. It was Bram Stoker, in Dracula, who is credited for coining the term undead. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein addresses the same concept. But these are all fictional tales. [1][1] What does the Bible say about zombies?

The Bible says that we are all born dead in trespasses and sins because of the sin nature that all of us humans inherited from Adam. We are basically the "walking dead" (spiritually speaking), zombies if you will, until we come to salvation in Jesus Christ.

The following is from Gotquestions.org:

To be spiritually dead is to be separated from God. When Adam sinned in Genesis 3:6, he ushered in a continuum of death for all humanity. God’s command to Adam and Eve was that they could not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It came with the warning that disobedience would result in death: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” The phrase “you shall surely die” could be literally translated “dying you shall die.” This signifies a continuous state of death that began with spiritual death, continues throughout life as a gradual degradation of the body, and culminates in physical death. The immediate spiritual death resulted in Adam’s separation from God. His act of hiding from God (Genesis 3:8) demonstrates this separation, as does his attempt to shift blame for the sin to the woman (Genesis 3:12).

Unfortunately, this spiritual – and eventual physical – death was not confined to Adam and Eve. As the representative of the human race, Adam carried all of humanity into his sin. Paul makes this clear in Romans 5:12, telling us that sin and death entered the world and spread to all men through Adam’s sin. Additionally, Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin is death; sinners must die, because sin separates us from God. Any separation from the Source of Life is, naturally, death for us.